Selecting a Wireless Sensor Development Platform

By Anton Hristozov, Union Switch &Signal
(10/28/07, 12:05:00 AM EDT) -- Embedded.com

The plethora of wireless sensor network development solutions offered today is overwhelming. It is not possible in any way to give a comprehensive coverage of the market.

Depending on your selection criteria this could be an easy choice or could be a difficult process. I spent more than a month looking at solutions from different vendors before jumping into the depths of new hardware, APIs and mountains of documentation. Since all these standards are evolving, the updates from the vendors are exacerbating the already steep learning curve.

Navigating the proprietary and official standards is difficult, depending on the marketing flavor experiences at some of the web sites. Another difficulty is that different hardware/software solutions are hard to compare, because there is no metric.

It is too hard to determine quantitatively how much better is certain technology compared to another. The best alternative is to rely on common sense and some guiding principles, such as open source versus proprietary code, open communication standard versus one company solution, etc. This article will present the problems a designer will face when implementing a wireless sensor network and the factors that are important in deciding which development platform to select.

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